Max Jr.

It’s bad enough they are screwing us. Now comes the PR blitz. They are hitting the airwaves, all the Clintonites Obamanites are out talking up this horrible bill.

This is an unsolicited email I got from Tester today.

Think I’m gonna puke.

Dear Mark,

As the holidays arrive, we are hard at work in the U.S. Senate passing a health care reform bill that will save lives, save money, and save Medicare.

There’s a lot of information going around about what’s in the bill and what it does. While some of the information out there is good, some of it is unreliable or flat-out false.

Here are a few key things you should know about the bill:

– It *keeps the government out* of your health care decisions

– It *stops insurance companies from denying coverage* for pre-existing conditions or illnesses in new plans

– It *lowers the national deficit* by hundreds of billions of dollars

– It *cuts waste and fraud in Medicare*, which will ensure that Medicare is around for future generations

– It *drives down the cost of health care* by providing more competition

– It *limits out-of-pocket expenses* for new insurance plans

I explained my support for health care reform — and shared real stories from Montanans — on the floor of the Senate today.

*Click here to watch my speech.*

The bottom line is, without this bill, we will keep paying too much for health insurance and for health care. Without it, too many will be left out, without any options if they get sick. And without it, insurance companies will continue to run roughshod over the system. You can find the whole text of the bill on my website at tester.senate.gov/health.

As always, thanks for your interest.

Senator Jon Tester

This man is going down in two years. I can feel it. Partisan politics is shown now to be a complete sham. Therefore, it will not hurt to elect a Republican. Nothing will change.

Republicans, have you got a candidate lined up? There’s a lot of beef on the hoof here. He should be an easy target.

Man bites dog: A journalist says something nice about blogging!

I listened in part to an interesting interview this morning on the Sirota show out of Denver. His guest was Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University.

One snippet sticks with me. He said something kind about bloggers. Most journalists hold us in low regard. And I don’t hold blogging to be anything important, but I guess there are national blogs that do command attention.

But what he said was more local in color – he said that there had always been bright and thoughtful people who saw through journalism and its pretensions. But they were never organized – just a voice here and there, and we all know what the lone voice who speaks out of turn more than once is: a crackpot. So critics of journalism were always demeaned. In their tight circle, journalists could self-gratify. They looked on us with some mild amusement.

The Internet and blogging has allowed us to band together, and now all the cacophony is sounding more like a chorus of complaints about journalists, who can no longer hide behind the green curtain. They are getting called out daily, and the voices, distant in the beginning, get louder every day.

I recognize the shortcomings of blogging – we don’t report on events, but rather comment on them. We don’t do primary research. We are, in short, not journalists. I cannot argue with those points, as they are simply true.

But who is there to talk about the shortcomings of journalism? When they get together, it is invariably to hand out awards to one another and talk about how precious they are to our republic. Do they talk about their own failure to report on events or do primary research? Do they talk of sycophancy? The replacement of hard-nosed reporting with detached (and safe) neutrality?

In the past, it was an occasional letter to the editor, and we all know, snark snark, that LTE’s are not to be taken with the gravitas of true journalistic endeavors. Blogs are the new LTE’s I guess, with one exception – we do not need approval to appear in print.

The world is changing. Newspapers are changing. Time magazine is edging towards People, the best news reporting is done on comedy shows. True journalists – those who work their trade, investigate powerful people and report back to us – the current model does not support them. What will we do for news?

A new model will form. The glimmerings out there – Huffington and foundations financing investigative journalism – it has potential. Like health care, journalism and profit don’t mix well. Investigative reporting never did threaten paycheck-signers or advertisers.

For the time being, how nice it must be to run a government or corporation without having to answer to the news media.

Kill Bill, Volume 3

Every now and then, in all of our blog discourse in this small small blogging community, I stumble on something worthwhile -that is, something outside of the normal give and take and repetitive nonsense. It’s rare, and even more rarely comes from me.

Anyway, today it is this, and this may wrap it up for me, so far as wisdom goes, for the year 2009: In matters of public policy, such as health care reform, it is essential to follow power to its source if one is to understand what is going on.

So in the health care debate, forget abut Max Baucus, or even Obama/Lieberman/Conrad/Nelson/Emmanuel. They are mere players. Real power lies elsewhere.

In the case of the bill before the senate, and the one that will ultimately pass, power lies with AHIP and PhRMA. They wrote the bill, and have been guiding us slowly to it by use of politicians as actors. The create imperatives (must have 60 votes!) and bad guys to set up fake showdowns. Harmful amendments (state-level single payer or drug reimportation) simply disappear without public debate. All towards a final goal.

Where is public power? What can we do? Given that politicians are useless and the pwer behind them is hidden, we can only mount enough pressure on them by forging alliances among natural enemies, to kill the bill. It has to be negative power. They do not respond to anything else.

For that reason, progressives, teabaggers, fiscal conservatives, libertarians, socialists and people who fear socialism and objectivists, among other, all need to join forces to kill this bill.

Politicians live by divide and conquer, and die when forces unify against them. We have a common goal. It is time for progressives to show up at a teabag rally – not to ridicule them, but to join with them. We need a visible coalition.

When “Terrorists” were called “Communists”

I ran across a fascinating interview at “Against the Grain” with Elaine Elinson and Stan Yogi, authors of the book Wherever There’s a Fight. The book in general is about the ongoing fight for civil liberties in California. I am most interested in their comments about the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the early 1950’s, the Red Scare, and the so-called “Hollywood Ten.”

After World War II, the U.S. was under new rule, and like a kid in a candy store, had at its disposal all of the assets of the collapsed British and French empires. The country would soon embark on imperial adventures, the first the disrupting of the Greek Resistance movement and subverting their elections. President Truman signed into law the National Security Act, the CIA was born, the Department of War was renamed “Department of Defense” (meaning we were going on the attack) and we entered a state of permanent war.

But the whole world was not our footstool, as parts of it were dominated by the Soviet Union, and were thereby made inaccessible to American business penetration. A long protracted struggle was in store. (China was “lost” in 1948, but was not expansionist, so not as great a concern as the USSR.)

To prepare the American people for the long struggle, a massive indoctrination campaign went in to motion. We had to be injected with fear, a fear so great that it would allow our leaders to set aside the Constitution with its attendant Bill of Rights. The object of our fear was to be our former ally, Russia, without whom we would not have won the European war. Russia itself had undertaken imperial expansion after the war, mostly to protect its borders from yet another western invasion. It had renamed itself the “Soviet Union,” later the “evil empire,” our eternal enemy. (Russia had always been our enemy, we would learn.)

The propaganda campaign was intense. I lived through it as a young child. We were taught in school that communists were everywhere, met in secret cells, and were plotting to overthrow our country (much as we are taught about “terrorists” these days.) These were the days of fallout shelters, air raid drills, and “duck and cover.” (Because television was black and white, the current threat-level color code was not useful.) A whole generation was injected with a dose of fear meant to last for decades.

Joe Stalin’s crimes were finally exposed too- when he was our ally, these were ignored.

A small part of the larger fear campaign was the HUAC Red Scare hearings, the purpose of which were, in my view, the put out the word that there were communist cells around, in our neighborhoods, on campus, in government at all levels, and in the world of entertainment.

The Hollywood writers were selected for special prosecution. They were

* Alvah Bessie, screenwriter
* Herbert Biberman, screenwriter and director
* Lester Cole, screenwriter
* Edward Dmytryk, director
* Ring Lardner Jr., screenwriter
* John Howard Lawson, screenwriter
* Albert Maltz, screenwriter
* Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter
* Adrian Scott, producer and screenwriter
* Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter

The HUAC dragged each of these men before them, the objective being to get them to “take the fifth”, which would incriminate them in the eyes of the American public. The Ten were too smart for this, and instead “took the first” and invoked their right to free speech. The committee did not take kindly to this,and eventually the Ten were accused and convicted of contempt of Congress, and went to jail. Dmytryk later turned on them to gain his freedom. The rest, in addition to jail time, were “blacklisted”,and never allowed to work again in the motion picture business.

An interesting footnote to this episode is that much of the work of these ten happened during World War II when Hollywood was a propaganda outlet for the war effort, and Russia was an ally. Their work in sympathy with our ally was also in service of our government, and was cynically used against them as part of the propaganda effort.

HUAC of course, was engaged in a much larger scare effort, and the Hollywood Ten were only minor victims. Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart and Walt Disney, among others, were cowardly quislings in working for the committee and against their fellows.

But in the end, we were all victims. The “Red-baiting” did not stop after the committee’s business, but rather went on for years. The U.S. would use the Soviets as casus belli for a host of adventures costing millions of lives.

Many say that the 1950’s,with HUAC and McCarthy and all that went on, is one of the most disgraceful periods in our history, when our constitution was shredded, propaganda ran amok, and ordinary decent people thrown in jail for thought crimes.

Not hardly. It’s fairly typical.

PS: The interview I cited above was not the one I thought it was. It’s interesting, but the HUAC/Hollywood Ten was something else,and I cannot find it again.

They got their sixty … we’re stuffed

Think Progress has a long list of bills that were passed by means of reconciliation, including the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy:

Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1980
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981
Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1982
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1983
Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1986
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1989
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993
Balanced Budget Act of 1995 (vetoed)
Personal Responsibility and Budget Reconciliation Act of 1996
Balanced Budget Act of 1997
Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997
Taxpayer Refund and Relief Act of 1999 (vetoed)
Marriage Tax Relief Act of 2000 (vetoed)
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001
Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003
The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005
Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005

Reconciliation rules are rather complex- the senate and house pass a budget resolution, a long and complex process, but ultimately requiring only a majority vote and no presidential signature to pass. Then various committees are instructed to propose legislation to bring spending and taxation in line with that resolution. Any bill that falls in line with the budget resolution can be passed by mere majority vote.

So, with a little advance planning, it appears as though the budgeting for health care reform could have been part of the resolution process, and passed with 51 votes.

There is also the “Byrd Amendment,” which limits bills passed by reconciliation to a ten year span if they add to the deficit. So the Senate could conceivably pass a good bill and revisit in over the next ten years to either freeze it in place, or make it better. (This is why the Bush tax cuts are set to sunset in 2011 – they increased the deficit and were passed via reconciliation.)

So, the question is, is there any way that health care could have fallen under reconciliation rules and been subject to a straight up-or-down vote? The answer has to be yes, of course, by simply budgeting for the necessary revenues to fund a bill during the resolution process. Then a committee would be directed to produce a bill, and presto-up or down vote.

I could be wrong about all that. One cannot hope to learn arcane senate rules in one sitting. And surely if it were that simple, it would be done. (Please note, Democratic readers, this is sarcasm.)

This much I am fairly certain about: The Democrats did not want reconciliation from the very beginning of the health care process. They wanted to have to buy off Olympia Snowe, and Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson. It was a convenient way for them to hide their own reluctance to pass any kind of meaningful reform.

By the way, I say “them”, and “Democrats”. There are good Democrats, but probably not enough to pass even an up-or-down bill. I speak in general terms because the ‘Good Dems’ are at a disadvantage, having the Republicans, the Democratic leadership and the White House working against them. They are a distinct minority when one considers the numbers of right wing Republicans and Democrat beards, and Obama/Emmanuel.

—————-

So, they got their sixty votes, I read. It’s a sad day, and Democrats will be hard to endure for a while as they tell us what a good deal they did for us. The public doesn’t seem to go along with that – this is a complex issue, but there were two very clear and well-understood objectives that could have been achieved with even a modicum of leadership: a Public Option, and an expansion of Medicare. We got stuffed on both, with no support at all from the White House.

Polls indicate that the public is very unhappy with the Obama/Lieberman bill, but I have to think that those two don’t care. Nor do I. Democrat control of congress and the presidency has given us this bill. How can it get worse?

————

PS: It’s worth inquiring here about the prevalence of the filibuster and the ability of Republicans to use it so freely these days on virtually all legislation. This is probably triangulation – an agreement among the leadership of the two parties and the president that the Republicans are to be the bad guys and use the filibuster to kill important legislation. Filibusters could easily be avoided or defeated if Democrat leadership wanted it so. The filibuster essentially defeats the momentum for reform that came out of the elections of 2006 and 2008. The parties present to the public the appearance of rivalry, but agree in principle on which legislation needs to be passed or defeated.

In the case of health care, filibuster was used as an excuse to water the bill down to one acceptable to the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies – likely down to a bill they wrote themselves.

A remedy to corruption

Here’s a proposal for campaign finance reform:

Pick a candidate for federal office. You are allowed to give that candidate a contribution of any amount to a maximum of, say, $500. Just a number.

When you file your tax return, claim a refundable tax credit of 80% of that amount, or $400.

It’s taxpayer-directed public financing. It would be quite easy to qualify candidates before they are tax-credit-worthy: To qualify for public financing, they have to raise a certain amount, say $50,000 from 5,000 donors. That way you could weed out the tiny splinters yet still allow small parties to compete. It would end the D-R-one-party-two-right-wing monopoly.

Of course, much more need be done than that, like somehow getting the advertising industry out of campaigns. Those 30 second ads are demeaning, insulting, and subversive.

One thing at a time.

By the way, I’m no great original thinker. This is how the Canadians do it. It ain’t just health care that they are good at.

Some Democrats who get it

The Denver Post today ran three letters regarding health care topics, each making points that Democrats need to hear.

It’s pretty clear that not only the Republicans abhor the idea of health care reform, but so do Democrats. The fact that Joe Lieberman, senator from Connecticut, is holding up the current health care bill and the Democrats do nothing to stop him indicates that he speaks for all of them. Lieberman is just doing his job, obstructing health care reform so that both parties in Congress do not have to lose their corporate benefactors.

Good Democrats should leave the Democratic Party and send a message that votes have to be earned. Democrats have been betrayed too many times in the last few months.

L. Highland, Morrison

It’s a painfully obvious point to make – and yet so many Democrats that I read don’t see it. That makes it even more painful.

A single senator has managed to kill both the expansion of Medicare and any possibility of a public option in the health care bill. So what is left? A mandate for almost everyone to purchase insurance and a federal subsidy to help those who cannot afford it.

In essence, what will be created by this bill is a very effective mechanism for transferring money from the federal treasury to the insurance industry. In other words, corporate America wins again.

I suppose that it is pure coincidence that Joe Lieberman represents Connecticut and Connecticut is the home of so many insurance companies.

Niel Powers, Colorado Springs

This writer does not see that he is being played by the “Bad Joe” tactic, but does see the larger goal of the Democrats’ efforts – to create a pipeline of subsidy to the health insurance industry.

I don’t know how the senators who voted down a proposal to allow Americans to import low-cost prescription drugs can justify their actions. The amendment by North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan would have helped millions of Americans who are paying premium prices because our nation’s drug companies have a captive market. Where are the open competition and free enterprise that we like to hold up as American values? Do these values and the needs of our people simply get pushed aside when they come into conflict with the personal and financial interests of these senators?

When we see officials from other countries involved in these types of actions, we call it corruption. I don’t see the difference here.

Fred Buschhoff, Denver

There ya go. It really is that simple. We are corrupt, decadent, and on our way to collapse. And that’s not a bad thing. We need to collapse. We’re not worth keeping around the way we are.

Others abroad surely agree. Let’s take a poll, starting in Iraq …

A rose by any other name …

I was reading an interesting exchange this morning between Gilbert Achcar and Noam Chomsky – the subject was terrorism, or more precisely, defining terrorism. Both, in the end, agreed that the definition of the problem is made more difficult by the need for profound dishonesty, that is, in the end, terrorism must mean “something that is done to us”, and not “something we do to others.”

That is indeed a problem. The official definition is the “calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature.” We can all agree that 9/11 was an act of terror, but what about bombing Serbia or Gaza, invading Iraq, and now attacking Pakistan by means of Afghanistan … maybe these are not acts of terrorism in that the goals are probably financial. But I’m not sure. We could be imposing an ideology on them- did not the Nazis impose their ideology on Vichy France? Do we not now have Vichy Iraq? Will we not soon have Vichy Afghanistan?

I gotta say, I’m catching the distinct odor of terrorism here – things we are doing to others … wait! Not possible. My bad.

If the real definition of terrorism is only things done to us by others, then we have to craft a definition that exempts us.

Policy experts are hard at work on the problem. They’ll come up with something, and it will be reprinted in all the fine journals and discussed on all the intellectual forums.

We’ll soon have a working definition. I’ll keep you posted.

Expressing inexpressible thoughts

In 1993 the musician Prince, in a flash of brilliance, decided to change his name to an unpronounceable symbol:

It didn’t really catch on, and worse than that, meant that newspapers and industry publications couldn’t write about him much, as his name was a symbol.

This reminds me of the inadequacies of our language. English is a really good language for a lot of things, and so flexible, but often people have to grab things from other languages to express a fine point. So for instance, from the Germans we get words like schadenfreude, meaning the joy we take at the misfortune of others, or zeitgeist, or spirit of the times. From the French we get a whole array of expressions – je ne sais quoi – that certain indescribable something, agent provocateur, one who entices another person to commit an illegal act or who deliberately stirs up rebellion to allow police to put it down (see how many words it takes?); and coup de grâce, or mercy blow – the kill shot. From the Italians, we learn how to order coffee.

Each of these expressions is used because they convey just a little bit more meaning than the English definition. My wife’s je ne sais quoi – well, you’d have to know her. I cannot describe it well.

I was looking for a word last week after a debate with Big Swede and Craig Moore – one that describes the indestructible wall of certainty that surrounds their stupidité profonde. In addition, I was looking for a word that describes Black Flag’s unwavering certainty in his philosophy of free markets in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

The best I could do was “absurd,” “bizarre,” “silly” and “ridiculous.” They don’t really carry it.

Then I had an idea – I don’t know enough French or German to grab the right phase from their language, but I do have access to a whole array of symbols via Microsoft Word. One of them will do – it will be the symbol I use to describe the indescribable. I will inject it at that point in a conversation where information can no longer be exchanged, when the language has lost power, and all we have left are blank stares. Here it is:

¥

I invite others to use it on me as well – I cannot not grasp things that I cannot possibly grasp. And, I invite others to offer their own words or symbols – we might breach a wall, and open up new lines of communication.